Reddit has banned 5 subreddits under its new guidelines to prevent harassment

In another move to eliminate trolling and hateful commentary, Reddit has banned five subreddits that violate harassment rules.

The subreddits — which all have terribly offensive names, even if you’re not the target of such vitriol — violate “rules based on their harassment of individuals”, according to Reddit. Only one of the subreddits had over 5,000 members.

This is the latest ploy by Reddit to make the forums more user-friendly, and leans heavily on its fresh harassment policy. Instead of relying on moderators to decide what defines harrassment, Reddit created rules to determine what was offensive.

Those rules now extend beyond user commentary, and may affect hurtful subreddit threads moving forward. There are likely plenty of questionable subreddits still on the site, so it’ll be interesting to see how Reddit deals with those threads moving forward.